Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Now I know how my dad felt when I did it to him, because my boys lost my loppers. They weren't even supposed to be playing with the danged, deadly things, but when I went to clear a fallen tree off a fence, "Where the bleep are my bleepin loppers!!?" For 11 years those old Fiskars ground through everything I threw at them, no maintenance ever, abuse heaped upon abuse and nary a complaint. And then they were gone. After a month of futile searching I consoled myself with the thought that I could buy an even better pair! Well, these ain't it. These are barely adequate for trimming ornamental bushes around the house. Fiskar's "PowerGear2" moniker, favorable reviews, and high pricing led me to believe they are tailor made for heavy duty jobs. Oh, not so! First job: I took them to a buckthorn grove and set to work. Right away small branches got stuck in the gearing, jamming completely and necessitating a grubby disentanglement. Much worse, with two hours of use the scissor blades had bent apart by 1/16th of an inch, making it impossible to cut anything. Out of frustration I resorted to pounding hard on the blades with a log for a hammer and a stump as an anvil. This bent the blades back together and allowed me to keep working, albeit more gingerly. As anyone who's done serious brush removal knows, when you're out there for a couple hours, sweating, dehydrated, head pounding, back aching, hands tingling, scratched and bleeding - the last! thing you need is a tool that fails the first time you take it out! Brush removal is hard enough. So, why are these loppers "barely adequate" even for trimming ornamental bushes around the house? Because the tips tend to separate on small twigs. If you catch a small, dry twig in the top 1/2" of the blades (smaller than a straw) it won't cut but will merely scrape between the blades as they close over it. Come on, Fiskars, you used to be the best of the best, top of the line. What happened? Bring back the old PowerGear loppers and trim your V2 from the product line (ahem).